Ted Saves the World Blog Tour and Giveaway

Good morning everyone, today I have a guest blogger, Bryan Cohen. Pull up a chair, pour yourself a glass of your preferred beverage, fill up you plate with goodies, and sit back and enjoy!

Building a World
By Bryan Cohen

The other day, I could not help but be drawn into a Harry Potter marathon on ABC Family. While I’d read all the books and seen each of the movies separately, I’d never watched two consecutive movies back-to-back. Accomplishing this lazy Saturday afternoon feat made me realize one of the things I love the most about J.K. Rowling’s work. She has gone to great lengths to create an astounding, complex and majorly interesting world.

A universe in which magic is a key ingredient is a world of surprise. Swords appear out of hats, overachievers can take two classes at once using time travel, and dastardly villains can leave pieces of their souls lying around. Literally anything can happen!

Before I read all of the Harry Potter books to impress a girl (true story), I likewise loved the open-ended world of Joss Whedon’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” For those of you who haven’t seen the show, it’s not just vampires and teen angst. Because the main town of Sunnydale, Calif., is located on a hellmouth, a gold mine of mystical energy, all sorts of evil creatures pop in and out of the show’s mythology. It’s a major achievement of the writing to create a situation where the reader/watcher is drawn into the world and is willing to believe all of the crazy stuff that goes on inside of it.

It is this world building that I was most excited about in starting my Ted Saves the World series. In the first book, the main character Ted finds out that there are a near infinite number of universes with Earth as one of the main battlegrounds of a war between very powerful creatures. As the series goes on, readers will learn that these different dimensions lead to very strange and unusual beings travelling to Earth on a regular basis.

While I can only hope to reach the benchmark of a fictional world as set by authors like J.K. Rowling and Joss Whedon, I am grateful to have such wonderful role models to live up to.

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Description of Ted Saves the World (Available for just $0.99):
A possessed cheerleader. A cursed gang of criminals. Mysterious telekinetic powers. An angry ex-girlfriend in gym class? One second, sophomore in high school Ted endures his first breakup in his favorite place in town. The next, a mysterious blue light turns him into a worldwide superhero sensation for taking down a posse of grisly murderers. As his views on YouTube increase and his friend Dhiraj tries to capitalize on the marketing potential, his dangers increase as well when a presumed-dead cheerleader begins taking a personal interest. Can Ted survive his first week as a superhero in the public eye? This novella is the first taste in a series of full-length novels about the adventures of Ted Finley and Erica LaPlante. The book is also available on Barnes & Noble and Smashwords for $0.99.

Giveaway:
Bryan Cohen is giving away four $25 Amazon gift cards, one for each week of his month long blog tour. To enter, simply comment with your e-mail address (feel free to substitute @ with (at) or other tricks to stop spammers from getting it). Bryan will draw the four names at the end of the tour, picking one entrant at random from each week’s set of blog posts. Entries will be counted through Monday, August 15th, 2011. Enter on as many sites as you want, follow the tour at Build Creative Writing Ideas. If Ted reaches the Top 100 on Amazon at any point during the tour, a fifth $25 card will be added to the giveaway.

Biography:
Bryan Cohen is a writer, actor and comedian from Dresher, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005 with degrees in English and Dramatic Art and a minor in Creative Writing. He has written seven books including 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts: Ideas for Blogs, Scripts, Stories and More. Contact Bryan through his Ted Saves the World blog, his Build Creative Writing Ideas site or Twitter.

Thank you, Bryan for joining us in Mary's Garden today, we've really enjoyed it. Please come by and visit often.